


Some Cold New River

by Devilc



Category: To Live and Die in LA (1985)
Genre: Blow Jobs, M/M, Mindfuck, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-18
Updated: 2010-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-13 18:10:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/140206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Devilc/pseuds/Devilc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Vukovich learns everything he'll ever need to know about the art of counterfeiting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Cold New River

**Author's Note:**

  * For [karaokegal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/karaokegal/gifts).



> The prompt was: "OMG-if you are a fellow fan of this movie, I love you already. My favorite character is that BAMF Richard Chance, so he's got to be involved. Het or slash is fine. Feel free to explore his fucked up relationship with Rick Masters, either in fantasy or reality, or his use and abuse of pretty much anyone else in his life. Maybe his first time with Ruth or something to show Vukovich just how much in charge he is. Backstory sex with Jim Hart? Feel free to make it as nasty and kinky as the movie itself. Dub con is certainly a possibility."
> 
> \---
> 
> Thanks to my beta, Miss Em, for being so game to take this on.

> If I let myself go  
> And for where I just don't know  
> I'd maybe hit some cold new river  
> That led out to the sea  
> An unknown sea  
> I'd either swim or I'd drown  
> Or just keep falling down and down  
> I think it's that, that makes me quiver  
> Just to keep falling down  
> Down, down, down

* * *

  
"You ain't shit on the street, you understand that? You ain't got the nuts to kiss my ass!" Chance shouts, and like that storms out the door of the bar.

John takes another drag off his cigarette, blows the smoke towards the ceiling and watches as Keith Olbermann gives the sports highlights, including a few rumors about what might be coming up at the Angels' and Dodgers' spring training camps.

As he stubs out his butt, he has an epiphany.

It's all about Chance. It always is. John knows this. He's small and scrawny and _nice_ and it says everything that Chance never calls him "John" but always "Johnny", like he's a kid brother and not a fellow agent.

John has never been partnered with a guy like Chance before. He knows that Chance doesn't want him. Hell, Chance just said so. Again.

He makes himself a deal: he's going to prove himself. He's going to drive that car. He's going to do whatever it takes to help Chance bag Rick Masters.

Recently he's heard some of the other agents say that Chance is obsessed with Masters, that it's beyond getting simply getting justice for Jack. John doesn't say anything to them, or if they push him, he simply says that they should all be as dedicated as Richard Chance.

What none of them sees, and what John sees so clearly now, is that he is to Chance as Chance is to Masters. For John it's not so much about bagging Masters -- although he certainly wants to see that happen for the sake of getting all that counterfeit ink off the streets, and the kind of advancement that comes from making a high-profile bust -- it's about getting to know Chance the way Chance knows Masters. He looks at this as an opportunity to learn everything the Secret Service couldn't teach him.

School is in session.

Because, _God_ , he's tired of being nice little Johnny Vukovich, the guy with no street cred. And, fuck, was Chance ever dead on about that. He realizes he wants to be just like Chance. The guy who all the right people like. The guy on track to becoming a legend in the Service. The guy they all respect -- even if they don't like him.

The guy who's got a plan to spin straw into gold.

The guy who gets things done.

The guy who always wins.

* * *

 _Of course_ Chance knows a crooked auto body shop that keeps late hours.

"You don't go around busting everybody, Johnny." Chance smiles indulgently at him as they sit on the cracked and stained vinyl chairs in the filthy little lobby while the Caprice gets a new rear window fitted. "You leave some behind as bait to catch the rest of the rats." He stretches, kicking his feet out before him. "Or, so they'll owe you a favor." His eyes say, _Owe you a favor, forever_.

John wonders exactly how you spin _quid pro quo_ into _in perpetuity_.

"C'mon, gotta make a call."

John follows him down to a pay phone in a neighborhood where John would think twice about walking alone this time of night because he doesn't have that invisible bubble that surrounds Chance and stands silently as Chance plunks a quarter in and tells (tells, not asks!) motor pool that the car's not coming back until tomorrow morning and that hey, he could tell them every damn detail of the flat tire it got and they can send a tow truck out to haul it home tonight, or, they can wait for him to drive it back tomorrow after he gets the nail, "one of those damn screwnail jobs," out of it.

Inside John shiver-shakes with an emotion he can't quite name. One second he's so scared he thinks he's going to vomit, and the next he's rolling on the waves of a massive adrenaline rush. He can't believe this is happening. Can't believe they might actually get away with it.

Chance hangs up the phone, studies him for a moment, shrugs, and heads back for the auto body place.

John falls in a step or two behind and looks at Chance striding confidently along in his jeans, as if he's the King of LA, and deep in his most secret heart John feels that that shiver-shaking between terror and ecstasy coalesce into something else. Feels it bud, burst, blossom.

(First the way Chance handled Masters getting in his face at the gym and now this.)

He still doesn't know what to call this emotion, but it almost feels like love.

* * *

Chance picks him up a little after sunrise in the now pristine (almost too pristine) Caprice. Abruptly he exits the freeway (the one they snarled for hours yesterday), barrels down some side roads, parks the car underneath an underpass, gets out, and gestures for John to follow.

John waits a three count before he opens the door. He doesn't know what to make of this, but he knows he can't just sit in the car.

Chance leads him across a berm and through a hole in the chain link fence to the next underpass and the railroad tracks that run beneath before hopping up on a maintenance platform. Something to do with the switches or lights, John supposes, as he scrambles to join Chance, who's staring at the platform on the other side, across the other set of tracks. "I sometimes think of playing chicken with the trains," Chance says out of the blue. "Two trains coming from opposite directions, and I jump off this platform just in front of the southbound, clear the tracks, make a running three steps and hit the other platform, one step ahead of the northbound."

At that moment, John starts to feel as much as hear the rumble of an oncoming train. "What's stopping you?" His voice sounds thin and papery and he knows the answer just as soon as the words leave his mouth.

Disappointment flickers through Chance's eyes. "I've studied every schedule I can lay my hands on, and they just don't do it, Johnny -- run two trains past this point at the same time." He looks once more past John, down the tracks at the engine coming their way at somewhere between five and fifteen mph, and John sees the look in his eyes turn inwards and grow daydreamy before he closes them. When Chance opens them again, they drill into John, clear and bright and hard and filled with unmistakable intent. They flick down to his own crotch and pause there a moment before drifting over to John and start slowly crawling up his body.

John doesn't have to hear the words to know what Chance wants from him.

A dutiful acolyte, John kneels and takes sacrament as the train passes, the engineer blowing his horn at them, and John hears him yell something out the window about "you filthy faggots", hears Chance make an answering shout of his own while he's got a nosefull of Chance's musk, the bitter saltiness of Chance's pre-cum making his mouth flood with drool, as he snakes his tongue over the fat vein that runs the length of Chance's cock, and somehow John just _knows_ that Chance is flipping the engineer the bird as Chance starts fucking his mouth hard and deep, an equally unstoppable engine, in time to the clacking of the rails.

When the moment comes, John realizes that he's got two options: pull back, and let Chance blast him in the face, which means that a good dollop of it will doubtless end up on his shirt and tie; or he can let Chance come in his mouth.

Only a little bit dribbles down his chin.

* * *

His stomach gives a sickening lurch 45 minutes later when he realizes they ripped off and killed an undercover FBI Agent yesterday.

With the kind of heat that's going to be directed their way, not even Chance the Almighty can pull off a win. But Chance doesn't see it that way and screams at John that the only reason the FBI put that information out on the wire is because they don't have jack and shit.

In the end, John decides he's going to explore all his options. He's no Chance, but even he knows that the best defense is a good offense.

* * *

John doesn't know where the words come from when Bob Grimes lays out his options. There's no way he can get out of this with out becoming a convicted felon. As Grimes tells it, John's got two options. Shit up to his waist if he goes to the US Attorney, or shit up to his eyebrows if they catch him. But he can't do it. That quivering emotion's back as he hears himself say that he can't he can't turn Chance in. Can't testify against him.

Thank God Grimes knows how to keep his mouth shut and this all falls under attorney-client privilege.

Except ... he and Chance got that face time with Masters in the gym the other day because Grimes is selling Masters out.

(Fuck!)

Except ... at this point, Bob Grimes has a lot to gain by seeing Masters doing life or dead. He's got nothing to gain by ratting John and Chance out. Nothing. Only a boy-scout would do that, and Grimes isn't a Boyscout. Not even close.

* * *

John keeps waiting Chance to bring it up, sucking him off as the train went by, because, as much as it felt like the right thing at the time, it's felt like a mistake ever since.

It's exactly the sort of thing that Chance does to get somebody right where he wants them so he can start turning the screws, and he's got every reason to want John under his thumb these days.

(At odd moments, when he's got the time to sit and think about it, the sheer size of the mess they're in makes John shiver. He feels like he's caught in an undertow and, despite kicking against it as hard as he can, he can feel himself getting dragged down and, worst of all, he's beginning to realize there isn't a bottom.)

He sweats bullets for the next two days because he's waiting for Chance to make that snide remark, the one that sounds totally innocuous to anybody else, but marks the beginning of Chance fucking him over because he can.

It doesn't happen.

What does happen is after a long, acid-stomach day of filling out forms in triplicate, Chance takes him to strip joint called Shipwreck Joey's Cabaret, where, with one look from Chance, the skinny blonde at the entrance waves them in, and Chance runs up a scary tab of overpriced whiskey sours (a tab almost big enough to be a car payment, which makes John wonder). Finally, Chance waves away a blonde trying to give him another lapdance, lights a cigarette, leans over and says, "Wanna know the closest I ever got to Masters, Johnny?"

John nods yes as he takes a sip of the beer he's been nursing all night long. Because, closer to Masters than they were undercover in that gym? _Really?!_

"Sucking his cock in this creepy fake-chic sex club up in 'Frisco."

The glass slips from John's suddenly limp fingers and slams on to the tabletop, sloshing most of the contents up, out, and into John's lap. ( _Great, now it looks like he peed his pants._ ) Chance just shrugs at the shell-shocked expression on his face, as if he had just said something as ordinary as talking about the weather or baseball, and continues, "I had to see how close I could get to him. Had to see if I had it in me to do whatever it takes -- _whatever it takes, Johnny_ \-- to get to him."

"And?" John's voice sounds thinner and squeaker than he'd like.

"I could've bitten his dick off and the bastard barely even looked at me." Chance scowls and takes a tight sip of his drink. "Came in my mouth, too."

 _It's a test,_ John thinks. _Could I do whatever it takes to see it through?_ He smiles inside. _I passed._

At least, he hopes it was a test.

* * *

"Talk to me!" The words come tumbling out of John's mouth even though he knows that Chance is as dead as it gets, because this isn't how it ends. It can't be. Chance wins. Chance _always_ wins. And he still hasn't taught John everything he knows about how to walk through a pile of horseshit like this and come out smelling like a rose.

And then, it's like a switch gets flipped.

John knows what to do.

John knows how to do it.

John does it.

* * *

His badge gains him entrance to Chance's place before he's even reported the death. The black book. Yeah, he could run Chance's lady friend's number through reverse directory and get her address, but that's official, that leaves a trail.

Only it's not a black book, it's a manila envelope full of photos and notes in Chance's angular scrawl that tell John everything he needs to know about Ruth Lanier, who John recognizes from the cabaret the other night, including something that even Chance didn't see: she tried to set Chance up (and by extension, him), get him out of her life, forever.

And, it so happens Chance also gave her $20k of the money they took off the FBI agent.

He realizes he's got Ruth right where he wants her.

Strangely enough, there's a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach as he stands in front of her door two days later, but that doesn't matter, because John's going to do this. He owes Chance that much.

(And, for all he knows, Chance had butterflies in his stomach day and night about the things he did. But that also doesn't matter, because what does matter is that you don't let it show. Chance didn't, and that's how to play the game. Or, at least, that's how John's going to play it. The coldness, the butterflies ... mind over matter. He tells himself he doesn't mind because they don't matter.)

* * *

Ruth lets him into the house after he drops Chance's name and _tells_ her -- the way Chance would -- to open the door for him.

As he crosses the threshold, a part of him, that little voice that's so very afraid of being swept away gets off one last parting shot, mocking him, telling him he's nothing but a counterfeit Chance now. He laughs back at it as he takes in Ruth, who seems dressed for a business meeting instead of working the door at place like Shipwreck Joey's. If fronting is what it takes to bring down the Rick Masterses of the world, he can do it. He can do it to put Ruth in her place and keep her there, too.

John sinks on the couch, head throbbing slightly from the beating Masters gave him, and watches her put a few more items in her suitcase before he lays it all out.

Of course she's got her reasons, but he blows through them. "If you're going to start by bullshitting me, we're going to get off to a very bad relationship."

She pauses, hands frozen over her suitcase.

"You're working for me now," he says. Not at all the voice he practiced what seemed like a thousand times in front of the mirror. Something quieter, more matter of fact, it comes from a place inside he didn't know existed. Until now.

The resignation blossoms, dull and leaden, in her eyes.

He did it. He's got what it takes.

And he's going to keep on doing it -- ~~for his country.~~ ~~for Chance.~~ for himself.

Because he can.

And that's just the way it works.


End file.
